by Scott Shane
In February 2001, Awlaki led a group of American Muslims on hajj—the pilgrimage to Mecca that is considered one of the five pillars of Islam. Hale Smith, a San Francisco attorney and Muslim convert who was on the trip, recalled Awlaki as “very Americanized,” “low-key, quiet and reasonable.” Smith found Awlaki “extremely conversant with the fine points of Islamic law” but also open-minded, willing to acknowledge that some sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad were “fake or very weakly authenticated.” Smith was put off by the male chauvinism and “medieval thinking” of some Saudi clerics they met and found the common sense Awlaki brought to religious texts to be a welcome contrast.
To all appearances, Awlaki was a modern American imam on the ascent, and official Washington was taking notice. In July he was invited to preach at the regular Friday Muslim prayers in the US Capitol. He extolled the Prophet Muhammad to a standing-room-only audience of Muslim congressional staffers, lobbyists, and bureaucrats as a sort of model statesman who was “extremely successful as a head of state” but who “never had to compromise his integrity.” His remarks were caught by a film crew shooting a documentary about Muhammad. Then a local Islamic institute that helped train Muslim chaplains for the US military asked Awlaki to lecture the trainees, who would soon be counseling Muslim American soldiers.
Speaking invitations poured in from much farther afield as well. In August, less than a month before 9/11, he spoke at a conference named “Allah’s Final Revelation to Mankind” at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. On September 1, he delivered a speech entitled “Tolerance: A Hallmark of Muslim Character” at the Islamic Society of North America conference in Chicago, asserting that “Muslims had the best track record of tolerance in the world” when they held power. A week later, he flew to California to address a fund-raiser for Jamil al-Amin, the former H. Rap Brown, a Muslim convert and imam whose forthcoming murder trial had become a cause célèbre for activists. He flew home on the morning of September 11, 2001, and learned of the attacks in New York as he rode in a taxi from Washington’s National Airport to the mosque, smoke rising from the Pentagon a few miles away. He had no idea, or so investigators would conclude, that three of the nineteen men who had just died carrying out the atrocity had heard him preach in San Diego and Falls Church.
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In October, despite the whirlwind of his life and work in the aftermath of the attacks, the entrepreneurial Awlaki found time to apply for and receive a copyright on his lecture series, “Lives of the Prophets.” The lectures had been recorded and published earlier in 2001 by an Islamic publisher in a Denver suburb, Al-Basheer Company for Publications and Translations, first on eighteen cassettes and shortly thereafter on twenty-three compact disks. This was the enterprise whose humble beginning had been on the sidewalk outside the San Diego mosque, with little brother Ammar selling homemade cassettes, along with the Yemeni honey.
The lectures, and the growing collection of Awlaki CDs, would play even more of a role than his media appearances in spreading his fame across the world of English-speaking Muslims. In San Diego, he had created a company, Al Fahm Inc., with a businessman who worshipped at the mosque, Sam Eulmi. But they couldn’t come to terms, Eulmi said, and Awlaki then connected with Al Basheer, run by a Saudi, Homaidan al-Turki, who would later go to prison in Colorado for abusing his Indonesian housekeeper. Despite that controversy, Al Basheer was a successful enterprise for some years, and Awlaki was its unrivaled star.
In news reports, Awlaki’s early lectures and sermons on CD are often mixed up with his later, militant speeches and declarations. That is a mistake. They are utterly traditional—a rendering into engaging English of classic stories from the earliest days of Islam. If there are hints of militancy or endorsements of violence—and suspicious listeners have found a few—they are buried in allegory and history. Only in hindsight’s distorting rear-view mirror can his accounts of episodes from the Koran and the hadith, the Prophet’s sayings, be taken as a sign of dangerous radicalism. It would be akin to declaring that a rabbi’s recounting of David’s use of a slingshot to do in Goliath was evidence that the rabbi endorsed terrorism. In fact, in “Lives of the Prophets,” his first major set of recordings, Awlaki was translating and retelling Al Bidayah wa’an-Nihayah (The beginning and the end), a sort of encyclopedia of Islam written by the fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Kathir, who lived near Damascus. Ibn Kathir was a revered muhaddith, or transmitter of stories about the Prophet from the hadith, and mufassir, or interpreter of the Koran. Awlaki’s skillful retelling and interpretation were part of a long and respected Islamic tradition, and Muslims in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom ordered the CDs by the thousands. They were grateful for a contemporary narration of the foundational stories of their religion—in clear English that their children could understand.
Awlaki spoke with warmth and simplicity, achieving the kind of intimacy that distinguishes the finest natural storytellers. “These are the best of stories, because they are dealing with the best of creation,” Awlaki said at the opening of the first lecture, covering the story of Adam, after a revved-up introduction using reverb to create an echo effect. Allah commanded the Prophet to “narrate these stories unto the ummah,” the community of believers, Awlaki said, “so it becomes a duty upon us to relate these stories.” Like any Christian preacher introducing Bible stories, Awlaki admonishes his listeners to ponder the meaning of the stories he will recount. “These stories are not to entertain us,” he said, “these stories are for us to derive lessons and reflect.” The importance of the stories, he explains, is that the early figures of Islam—the Prophet Muhammad; the other prophets, including Moses and Jesus; and the Sahaba, or companions of the Prophet—“are the best, and we need to have role models.” His emphasis on showing young people the right path was especially notable. “If we are not going to provide our children, our youth, with role models” from among the heroes of Islam, Awlaki said in that first lecture, “they’re going to find role models somewhere else, because human beings cannot live without role models. Every human being,” he said, “has role models—if they are not good, they’re going to be bad.” It was a point that would be made often in the coming years by those who were fearful of what Awlaki himself had become.
In late January 2002, as the popularity of Awlaki’s growing collection of CDs was taking off, he got an unusual invitation. The Defense Department’s Office of General Counsel had a series of luncheon speakers, and a bureaucrat working there had heard Awlaki give a talk to residents of a luxury apartment complex in nearby Alexandria. She had been impressed both by “the extent of his knowledge” and by how he “handled a hostile element in the audience.” He had condemned Al Qaeda and 9/11—presumably a minimal requirement for an invitation to one of the institutions targeted in the attacks—and Pentagon staffers knew that the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, “was eager to have a presentation from a moderate Muslim.” On February 5, the luncheon took place, Awlaki spoke, and no one appears to have been scandalized.
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Awlaki was steering a cautious course across a polarized political landscape. He denounced Muslim extremism while trying not to offend the sensibilities of his conservative Muslim congregation, which included many immigrants raised on angry denunciations of Israel and other presumed enemies. His task wasn’t getting easier. As the weeks passed after 9/11, Muslims in America felt increasingly under scrutiny and pressure. The time of sympathetic candlelight vigils had passed; now Awlaki’s congregants traded stories about insults to women who covered their hair and about Muslims who received the cold shoulder from once-friendly workmates. Now, too, worshippers at Dar Al-Hijrah began to feel the heat from government agencies that were seared by their failure to prevent the attacks and terrified that new plots might be in the works.
Many Muslims in the United States resented being implicitly blamed for the mass murders on 9/11, in which they had played no part and which their leaders had immediately
and repeatedly condemned. Tales of FBI investigators or immigration agents knocking unannounced at the homes of Muslims in northern Virginia, many of them doctors, engineers, and accountants, stirred anxiety. Some worshippers at Dar Al-Hijrah spotted strangers wielding video cameras in the parking lot after Friday prayers. As the FBI and other agencies stepped up a frantic hunt for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in America—cells that would turn out essentially not to exist—people in Awlaki’s congregation traded stories of rude and ill-informed investigators turning up at their workplaces and homes, asking, for instance, their view of Osama bin Laden. (That seemed a naive question; presumably a real Al Qaeda operative would be shrewd enough to not to share his real views of his boss with the FBI.) Immigrants who had fled repressive governments in the Middle East with their all-powerful mukhabarat, or intelligence service, began to sense a similar heavy government hand in America. The initial wave of fear began to give way to anger. Then came Operation Green Quest and two days of federal raids on more than a dozen Islamic institutions, businesses, and homes in northern Virginia.
When Awlaki stepped to the microphone at Dar Al-Hijrah to address the crowd at jummah prayers on Friday, March 22, 2002, his voice shook. His fury was palpable. He spoke not of Islamic history or the requirements of life as a good Muslim, his usual themes, but of the heavy-handed raids, which had hit the community like a tornado. He called the federal sweep a “campaign…against the Muslim community” and said it was “an indication of the dangerous route this war on terrorism is taking.” He read a long list of the Islamic institutions targeted in the raids, names well known to many of the hundreds of people gathered for prayers. He called it “strange and amazing” that among the targets was the Fiqh Council of North America. Fiqh is Islamic jurisprudence, and Awlaki noted that the Fiqh Council, a committee of revered religious scholars, had actually issued a fatwa, or ruling, approving the American invasion of Afghanistan. Many Muslims considered that council’s rulings “very mild or watered-down”—yet the council, too, was raided. “What is next,” Awlaki asked, “and who will be safe?”
The raids were the culmination of Operation Green Quest, a hunt for sources of money for Al Qaeda, and involved some 150 agents of the US Customs Service, the Internal Revenue Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, among other agencies. In the end, it produced much smoke but little fire; though at least two targets of the raid were convicted of crimes unrelated to Al Qaeda, the national 9/11 Commission would ultimately conclude that “the United States is not, and has not been, a substantial source of al Qaeda funding.” Operation Green Quest, which some FBI officials saw as a ham-handed effort of other agencies to get in on the post-9/11 action, became the subject of turf battles and was finally shut down in 2003.
The complaints voiced by Awlaki, who was speaking for many in his mosque, were aimed not at the notion of hunting for terrorist financing but at the operation’s unselective sweep and cowboy clumsiness. The agents had not limited themselves to raiding offices but had burst simultaneously into the homes of many Muslim leaders, carting away truckloads of computers, documents, and books. Awlaki harped in particular on one episode that would resonate for years in the community: agents had handcuffed the wife and daughter of one Muslim leader at gunpoint and held them for four hours, not allowing them to get their head scarves—grossly disrespectful treatment in a conservative Muslim home. His voice uncharacteristically rushed and strained, Awlaki pronounced a grave conclusion: “So this is not now a war on terrorism—we need to all be clear about this. This is a war against Muslims. It is a war against Muslims and Islam. Not only is it happening worldwide, but it is happening right here in America, that is claiming to be fighting this war for the sake of freedom while it’s infringing on the freedom of its own citizens—just because they’re Muslim, for no other reason.”
It was a long way from Awlaki’s comments a few months earlier about Muslims’ appreciation for American freedom. If he had previously been working to calm non-Muslims’ fears about Islam, and Muslims’ fears about the American government—well, the authorities were now making that impossible. “The government knows very well that there’s a lot of anxiety among the American public when it comes to Islam, because the people don’t know what Islam is about and they don’t know what we stand for. Therefore conducting such a search at this particular time is very sensitive—it’s sending a very wrong message to the American public….Why tie in these American Muslim institutions to what has happened on September 11 when there’s no connection?”
Just six months earlier, he had stood in the same spot, before a crowd of worshippers at Dar Al-Hijrah, and declared: “We are the bridge between America and 1 billion Muslims worldwide.” Now, his efforts to build that bridge, to be the interpreter and go-between, seemed to have run aground. It would come as a disappointment but not really a surprise to his many admirers when they learned that just days after delivering this fiery sermon Awlaki decided to leave the United States for good. It made sense, after all. The Green Quest raids had been the last straw. The wave of hostility to Islam, instead of subsiding, had gained new force. The very government that was supposed to enforce the rights of all Americans seemed to have decided, on the basis of dubious or nonexistent evidence, that American Muslims and their institutions must be “with the terrorists.”
In fact, however, that was not the whole story. Awlaki’s decision to leave the United States was far more complicated than it appeared. Even after the raids that had so infuriated and depressed him and his congregation, he had been planning to stay. What Awlaki learned just a few days after his fiery sermon would terrify him and put his career in extreme jeopardy. The discovery that prompted his sudden departure involved matters that he could never discuss in a Friday sermon.
6
TOTALLY PLANNING TO STAY
On December 13, 2001, a mild but blustery day, Anwar al-Awlaki drove his white Dodge Caravan across the Potomac into Washington and parked west of Dupont Circle. He’d purchased the used minivan when he’d moved to Virginia to accommodate his growing family—after seven years of marriage, he and his wife, Gihan, had three children. Such solo drives had become routine for him, though the settings varied; sometimes it was a motel in a seedier part of the city, or tonier lodging in the sprawling Virginia suburbs. This time it was the Marriott Residence Inn on P Street toward the end of the holy month of Ramadan. In his Washington Post online chat a few weeks earlier, he had explained that Muslims abstained from sexual activity during Ramadan between sunrise and sunset. It was 2:30 p.m. when he made his way to Room 1010, where a young woman from Texas awaited their appointment.
He was a computer engineer, born in India and now living in California, Awlaki told her. He was polite and apologized for sneezing so much, explaining that he was suffering from hay fever. He handed over $220 and she performed oral sex on him. He “finished very quickly” and asked her for another round, the woman would later recount. But she was trying to raise the money to go to college in Florida and said he’d have to pay another $220. He said he’d pay again only for full sexual intercourse. She declined and he went on his way. He was a busy man, after all.
After their testy, inconclusive interviews with him in September, FBI counterterrorism agents were worried that Awlaki’s contacts with the 9/11 hijackers might not have occurred by chance, as he had claimed. So starting two weeks after 9/11, they had assigned the bureau’s Special Surveillance Group to keep tabs on him. SSG operatives are not agents and don’t carry guns; they tend to have less education and training than agents and have the straightforward job of following their quarry by car and on foot and taking notes and sometimes pictures. In Awlaki’s case, the agents soon learned from the SSG watchers that the imam indeed had a rich secret life. But it had nothing to do with terrorism.
In the months after 9/11, the watchers from the SSG followed Awlaki to assignations with prostitutes at the Wyndham City Center, the Melrose, t
he Monarch, Avenue Suites, the Swissotel, and more. Agents would follow up with the women later the same day or the next day, asking about Awlaki’s words and actions. He liked the lights on, the agents learned. He found the escort services online and booked their services under his real name. Sometimes he asked for intercourse, sometimes oral sex, and sometimes he just watched the woman stimulate herself while he masturbated. The women had no complaints (though one, checking him out through the peephole in the hotel room door when he knocked, thought he resembled Osama bin Laden). He was “clean,” “sweet,” and “very nice,” they said. If he harbored anti-American feelings or was concocting secret terrorist schemes, he showed no sign of it.
The pages and pages of scribbled notes from the surveillance teams and the typed interviews with escorts contained few surprises. Awlaki had been picked up twice in San Diego soliciting prostitutes, but he had not been deterred. Despite his more demanding schedule and the higher stakes now that a spotlight was trained on him in Washington, it had become a habit he could not, or did not want to, break. His FBI tails even followed him as he took the subway to the Pentagon to appear as a luncheon speaker.
The imam who had preached at the Capitol, whose CDs were in the homes of the devout, who was regularly quoted as a spiritual authority, skulked secretly around the city, violating the moral rules he taught. In one surveillance photo, he made his solitary way down a city sidewalk to his next assignation, hands in the pockets of his trench coat, seemingly lost in thought. It is a glum picture, and the FBI files make for dispiriting reading—the cringe-worthy wanderings of this married father of three and the depressing snippets of the biographies of the women. (“She comes from a poor family in New Hampshire,” the agents reported of the woman at the Melrose, “and is doing this kind of work strictly for the purpose of making money.”) As a humiliating coda, the FBI tails also dutifully followed his wife on her shopping trips and the entire family on outings to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and dinner at a Phillips Seafood restaurant.